In Nevada, there is a Primm pit stop, then Vegas in the rearview. There is dust and there are rocks and mountains, and in between, brief blips of infrastructure punctuate the undulating beige.

In Arizona, there is a small slice of beauty stuffed inside a winding canyon.

In Utah, there is an impressive display of Weather: sun, clouds, heat, chill, wind, rain, hail, snow. There is a succession of mountains, each larger than the last, until finally the most skyward of the bunch don winter caps. There is also Cracker Barrel.

In Idaho, there is idyll. There is a fresh, green coat of spring tucked between spires of snow and rock. There is gravel, upon which casual cycling ensues. There are cats and dogs and near-constant birdsong. There is a brewery with horses and bikes and dogs and babies and popcorn and tacos and a fat lawn that invites lazy, gracious sprawl. There are pastoral sunsets and cabin dreams. There is also Garth Brooks, projecting from the radio his many loves and losses.

In Wyoming, there is magic. There are tufts of green-gray sagebrush and stands of pines guarding hidden lakes that are in turn guarded by showboat peaks. There are elk and baby elk and bison and baby bison, and bastardizations of cowboy songs inspired by such majesty. There are antlers – so many antlers. There are best-laid plans and watery reflections and there is future conjuring. There is also vodka inspired by the great and powerful Channing Tatum.

And then, a reluctant return.

In reverse, there are yawns and early morning sentences still half-spackled to our throats. There is coffee, praise be. There is Cracker Barrel. There are hours spent climbing and descending various lumps in the Utah outback. There are Combos and ice cream sandwiches and jellybeans and proclamations of Only Vegetables From Henceforth. There is a return to beige. There is a large thermometer towering over the Baker Denny’s, where there is a large skillet decorated with overcooked salmon and wilted vegetables. There is bottomless Coca-Cola. There are taillights and billboards and honks, and then there is “civilization.”

And then, finally, home – or the fading construct of some such place, when all I long for is the freedom of the range.

Headlamps and lanterns flickered around for a while like fat fireflies, and then it was just the darkness and me, only the snowmelt rumble of the nearby Merced for company. There were hundreds of people scattered around in the pines, snoring or laughing or telling ghost stories with flashlights shoved under their chins, but I was so beautifully alone. To feel that way in what is arguably Mother Nature’s Times Square was ridiculous and wonderful.

Landing alongside a meadow with a moonlit view of Yosemite Falls, I felt compelled to gawk at the granite for a while, then leaned back and spent some time with the stars, maybe made a wish, a secret between me and the cosmos.

Thanks for listening, Universe. I’ll try to keep listening to you, too.

For a moment, I was just another Valley creature, my ears attuned to every scritch and squeak of nocturnal rustling, my lungs flush with that cool, pine-scented air. I sucked in as much as I could…just a little more…a little more…like some basement stoner, hoping to trap some inside, always and forever.

After some time tucked into that sweet spot, I uncurled and shuffled back to camp, reluctant steps like peas pushed around a plate. But still it came, that soft mourning that always sneaks up as I prepare to leave behind the wild places that make me feel so feral and free.

A few more deep breaths.

Yosemite: lover, friend, sister, confidant, all-seeing mystic with a direct conduit to my soul.

I’ll be back soon.

I woke at 3:45am after a fitfully short sleep fraught with weird dreams and a burning desire to pee. A scant 15 minutes later, I slumped my way down to the hotel lobby, greeted by a glum crowd of fellow travelers who informed me that our 6am flight was delayed. I considered crying, but being far too tired to muster tears, made a few small, maniacal cackles instead and hopped into a waiting taxi bound for the Charlottetown Airport.

At said airport, I slouched in line with the zillion other zombies waiting to be rebooked. When my time finally came, my flight was re-routed to include a 9-hour layover in Montréal. After the slightly crabby check-in lady suggested this was the only option, I simply replied, “NO.” And then I said “NO” again, just for good measure. Perhaps out of spite, she offered an alternate itinerary that would have meant an even longer layover and even later arrival into Los Angeles, to which I once more replied, “NO,” unable to dislodge any other word from my cranky, sleepy brain. As a conciliatory gesture, she suggested that I could spend the day shopping in Montréal along the famed Rue Ste-Catherine. As an equally conciliatory gesture, I did not punch her.

New, aggressively inconvenient boarding passes in hand, I breezed through the anemic security area and proceeded to commandeer a corner of the waiting lounge, which was also the airport’s restaurant and gift shop.  In my delirious state I considered buying something called “Potato Gloves,” but instead decided to get a bunch of work done and was almost perversely productive.

Several mind-numbing hours later, we were on our way to Montréal. I wedged myself in for a scant 20 minutes of sleep, buffered by an additional 50-60 minutes of that uncomfortable head-bobbing thing that happens when you try to actually sleep on a plane. Once on the ground and roused from this non-slumber, I yanked my suitcase out from the minuscule luggage compartment and debarked into a glorious ocean of French. Paris, je t’aime!

Oh, wait…nevermind.

After a refreshing visit to the ladies’ room, I found the concierge, checked my bags, and purchased a ticket on the 747 bus headed into downtown Montréal. On a related note, I spent bits of most of my day wondering if I were to get lost, would I ask, “Oú est la bus sept quatre sept?” or “Oú est la bus sept quarante-sept?” I never came to a concrete conclusion. In fact, when I had a legitimate opportunity to use either of those phrases later in the day, I instead shrugged my shoulders, waved at the air around my body, and didn’t use any real words, English or French. More on this later.

The upside of our excessive wait for the morning’s delayed flight was that I had time to suss out a plan for my 9-hour tour. I knew that I wanted to see some old stuff, so I hopped off the bus on Boulevard René-Lévesque, intending to walk towards Nortre Dame, but instead instinctively veered towards the positively autumnal lump hovering over to the west – Mont Royal, the city’s answer to Central Park. En route, I stopped for breakfast and was palpably disappointed when my server insisted on speaking perfect English. I still said “merci” after ordering, just because.

After devouring my eggs and talking myself out of an ill-advised pain du chocolat, I began walking towards the park. By “walking,” I mean, “moving ahead two feet, taking a picture of the foliage, making quietly excited noises, then moving ahead another two feet, repeating the scene.” It was electrifying.

Eventually, I spotted a sign that read “Lac-aux-Castors,” and if there’s anyone who thrills to the idea of wandering around in ankle-deep piles of Technicolor leaves to a sparkling lake, it is most certainly moi. I skipped through the spectacular foliage in an advanced state of wonder…until I came across the somewhat disappointingly construction-choked puddle that passes for Lac-aux-Castors.

It may not be an alpine watering hole, but it was autumn, and I was in Montréal, and that is all that really mattered at that particular moment. Continuing my mini adventure, I wandered over to a stone building, where I bravely, boldly walked up to the gift shop clerk and stuttered, “Avez…vous…une…carte…du…parc?” Knowingly, she placed her index finger ever so gently upon the English-language park map and replied, “En Français…ou EN ANGLAIS?” Out of a mixture of shame and convenience, I chose Anglais.

With my newfound guide to parkland freedom, I took to the paths like a seasoned pro, weaving around strollers and dogs and scads of unemployed Canadians. I strolled through the Cimetière Mont-Royal, a serenely gorgeous swath of rolling green hills, then made my way up to a lookout perched high above the city, marveling at the weird fortune of being right there in that spot at that very second, an accidental tourist if there ever was.

Puffed up by a foliage-induced second wind, I bounded down a set of infinite stairs to the streets far below and commenced a power walk to Vieux-Montréal, home of the city’s old stuff. Upon arrival, I realized that as lovely as the area might appear at first glance, all quaint storefronts and crumbly masonry, it’s actually a tourist magnet of the highest order, studded with cheap souvenirs and Americans wielding unnecessarily large cameras. Every object in every window featured a maple leaf stamped, sewn, drawn, painted, etched, or otherwise emblazoned onto it.

Here, the tide shifted.

I was exhausted. I was hungry. I was thirsty. I was hitting the wall.

I sat down on a park bench and upon taking stock of my tired feet and my tired brain, figured it was probably time to head back to the airport lest I pass out and wake up smothered in newspapers and surrounded by empty Molson cans. Recalling the advice of the smarmy airport check-in lady, I decided to wander back via Rue Ste-Catherine, her favorite shopping area in all the land. Turns out, this magical lane is nothing more than your typical urban street, filled with your typical urban shops, and your typical urban undigestible foods. It was time to go home.

Feet screaming, I lumbered my way back to the intersection where the bus dropped me off hours earlier. I looked for a stop on the opposite side of the street and finding none, began to wander around in search of those three magical numbers. 7-4-7. 7-4-7. Where the hell is the other stop for the 7-4-7?!

In the midst of my existential crisis, I saw the very 747 I sought heading straight towards me like some sort of multi-axeled unicorn. My heart filled with glee! As the bus stopped at a red light, I ran across and waved at the driver, who waved back at me with a smile, as if to say, “Hi, old chum!” But, we were not chums. Stymied, I waved again, using both hands in a modified version of the classic “Help! I’m drowning!” motion. My mustachioed friend waved back, with an even larger smile this time.

He was playing games with me, taking some sort of sadistic pleasure in my distress. I did not like this.

I made one more attempt, this time plastering a confused look on my face, gesticulating wildly at the air around me, mouthing, “Where? Where? Where?” until he pointed towards the back of the bus and drove off in a thick cloud of snark.

I found the correct stop two blocks down. Jerk.

Once on a much nicer bus, I propped my eyelids open with my index fingers and thumbs, and managed to stay generally awake until deposited at the airport. I found my way back to the luggage room, which to my horror was completely shuttered. A sign read, “Retour a 1:15,” yet it was almost 4pm. I suddenly felt like a bit player in some sort of Lynchian dystopia. Was I at the right terminal? The right airport? Was I even awake? What if this is all a dream?

After deciding that I was, indeed, in the right place and of sound mind and body, I began calling through a gap in the metal curtain, “Bonjour? Monsieur? BONJOUR? MONSIEUR? ALLO????” which alerted a nearby security guard to my presence.

“MADAME?” he inquired, with a faint hint of alarm.

I pointed to the metal blockade and pulled together a sentence that at the time, I thought communicated, “My luggage is inside,” but upon reflection, realized was probably more like, “I have books on there.” Regardless, by some miracle, he understood and ran off to fetch a key. In fact, he ended up fetching several keys, none of which seemed to work. While this was going on, a crowd began to amass and I was questioned repeatedly, in at least 3 languages, as to what was going on with our collectively imprisoned luggage.

Eventually, my hero returned with the golden key and unlocked the metal gate, which caused me to spontaneously, loudly proclaim my very Americanness with a resounding holler of “WOO HOOO!”

In the midst of my celebration, a very grumbly old woman nudged in front of me and began hurling a strange stew of words towards my face. I gathered that she was a) Czech, b) in a hurry, and c) cranky. She pointed to me, then pointed at the security guard / my savior, and loudly announced in both French and English, “I WAS HERE FIRST!” The security guard pointed at me and responded, “No, she was here first,” to which the Czech lady responded even more loudly, like a multilingual toddler in the throes of an escalating tantrum, “NOOOOOOO, MONSIEUR – IIIII WAS HERE FIRST.”

I believe she was still proclaiming her firstness as I walked away with my luggage, which took the guy all of 55 seconds to procure.

Reunited with my worldly possessions, I dragged myself over to the security line and waited and waited and waited, until I finally reached the actual security point, where I was summarily denied entrance. When I asked where I was supposed to go, the security lady spoke to me very sternly, very Frenchishly, and asked where I was headed. I mumbled something about voyaging to the United States and she told me to walk about 20 more miles to the complete other end of the airport, which I did.

I waited in many more lines until I reached the customs area. There, on the cusp of freedom, I made my way to the window, where the attending agent asked for my paper. “What paper?” I asked. “This paper,” he said, holding aloft one of those blue customs forms that they usually hand out on the airplane. Looking back at the unbelievably long line I’d just emerged from, I swallowed and said, “Um, I don’t have that paper.” A pit of despair bloomed in my growling stomach. I feared being sent back from whence I came. Feared never being able to board my plane. Feared never getting home.

His response, in these post-9/11, ISIS-fearing, Ebola-ravaged times?

“Ah…it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. We don’t have to follow the rules all of the time!”

With that, he winked at me and stamped my passport and I was free to leave, prompting the reminder that sometimes the best part of traveling is going home.

This question came up amazingly often during my first week in Tanzania, and I always answered with momentary silence followed by a stupid, awkward laugh. I reflected on this as I spent a good chunk of one early morning evacuating the contents of my bowels into a fairly functional flush toilet in a two-room canvas tent smack in the middle of the Serengeti, a chorus of wildebeest grunts accentuating each uncomfortable heave. Despite my digestive discomfort, there was a hot water bottle nestled in my bed, a plush bathrobe draped on a hook, and I was about thirty minutes away from having a French press full of steaming coffee delivered straight to my front flap. Here, I was rich – or at least rich-adjacent.

It felt sort of weird, this idea of being viewed as wealthy. I felt a complex swirl of guilt and defensiveness, tempered by the reminder that when I asked why there were going to be so many porters on my upcoming Kilimanjaro expedition, the answer was, “Everybody in Tanzania needs a job!” Halfway across the world, I was an eternally unzipped wallet. The Bank of Shawnté. A walking, talking dollar sign.

Except for at the moment, I wasn’t doing any walking or any talking – I was hunched over a cold toilet, groaning to myself, realizing the limits of my intestinal flora. I suddenly remembered the seemingly overzealous suggestion that I avoid all produce for my first few days in the country and immediately made a mental tally of the massive amount of vegetables I ingested in the name of hunger and in the hope of avoiding unidentifiable meat products.

Gurgle.

After some time, I reluctantly left my perch, packed my things, and staggered over to the Land Rover for one last game drive back to the airstrip. Once we touched down in Arusha, I bid adieu to my safari mates Debbie and Dan, then made a mad dash for the bathroom, where I was confronted with The Most Terrifying Thing given my current physical state:

The Drop Toilet.

Also known as a pit or squat toilet, this is basically a hole in the ground over which one hovers to do their business. Once you’re finished, you shake and spray – there’s usually a hose stashed in the corner of the room – or if you were brilliant enough to think ahead, use toilet paper that you smuggled in, then trudge the used bits out to a nearby waste basket for deposit.

Here at the airport, the setup was only vaguely civilized – cracked, wet tile and the stench of a thousand soiled diapers. Every square inch was wet with water or urine or some unidentifiable liquid other. I practiced squatting in various positions with my purse slung across my chest and my duffle balanced on my thighs, but upon realizing that I had no toilet paper and that the morning’s business was as yet unfinished, decided to wait for the clean porcelain familiarity of my sparkling hotel commode.

Waiting for me at the airport was a kind, quiet guy named Nico, a driver employed by the company I’d be trekking with on Kilimanjaro in the coming week. I was glad for his comfortable silence, a rarity so far in my chatty Tanzanian travels, because it allowed me not only to focus on clenching tight every inch of my war-torn digestive system, but also to think about all of the questions I’d been peppered with over the past few days. My drivers were all men, from my first airport pickup to my safari guides to Nico here, and their inquisitions were nearly identical:

Why did you come to Tanzania?

Do you believe in God?

Are you married?

Do you have children?

Are you traveling alone?

Intrusive and awkward? Sure. Malicious and judgmental? Not at all.

I came to Tanzania, I usually explained, because I’ve heard that the people are wonderful, the scenery is marvelous, the animals are magnificent, and because I want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.

I want to…well, I want to have an experience.

That last part sounds ridiculous, so in truth, I never said that out loud. Dear sir, I spent a Tanzanian lifetime’s worth of cold, hard, crisp, unwrinkled American dollars so I could drink hot coffee in a fancy tent, shit in a flush toilet on the Serengeti, marvel at a multitude of horned beasts, and traipse up a giant volcano. I want to experience your exotic culture and eat your exotic food and take pictures of your exotic scenery. I want to get away from my regular life for just a little bit and have an Adventure.

Instead, I piled on frothy platitudes about the Wonders of Tanzania and waited patiently for the next question.

“Do I believe in God?” [Noting the rosary draped around the rearview mirror.] “Wellllll, I’m a very spiritual person.” [Glancing at the dalla dalla ahead, where Tupac’s disembodied head floats above a neon pink splash of “GOD LOVES YOU!”] “Very, very spiritual, really.”

Once the driver replied with the usual praising of Jesus, I was then hit with the one-two punch of “Where is your husband? Where are your children?” In as many words, I replied that I was a childless singleton and patiently awaited the flood of gently pity-filled questioning that followed. “Ohhhhh, why are you not married? Why don’t you have children? How old are you? Do you want a husband? Why do you travel alone?”

After hearing this round of questioning often enough during my trip, I settled on the belief that there’s some sort of government-mandated pamphlet issued to all drivers titled “How To Make Small Talk With American Women.” It was like a mobile version of Groundhog Day.

One morning late into my trip, I was in a van driven by a talkative man named Abdullah, headed towards the grassy shores of Lake Duluti for a canoe trip. When he asked if I was married, I blurted out, “Why does everyone keep asking me that question?” I mean, outside of family reunions, I’d never had so many people interested in my relationship status as I did in Tanzania.

Abdullah chuckled. “Well, because when we see a woman traveling alone and we find out that she is not married, we know that she is honest and brave, and we think she is a warrior to come to Tanzania by herself.”

Ohhhhhhhhhhh. I let loose a huge, strangely proud smile. I could be into this.

Not a half hour later, my canoe guide Emmanuel unsurprisingly drilled through the requisite conversational blitz and after I responded that I was unmarried and traveling alone, he grinned and exclaimed, “Ah, you are like a female Maasai warrior!” I wanted to high-five him in the most serious way, but considering we were about two feet away from a toothy monitor lizard the size of a small child, I thought I’d better keep both hands on my paddle.

In my glorious Wonder Woman haze, I was reminded of a conversation I had earlier with Victor, after I asked him if women ever became safari guides. He said that he only knew one female guide, and explained that women weren’t usually as tough physically as you needed to be in order to deal with the very real dangers on safari, especially considering the violent poachers that roamed the area. “African women just aren’t raised to want to be that way,” he shrugged. “In the Western world, especially in the United States, women are raised to be human beings, but here, they’re raised to be women.”

I realize how that might read, but Victor wasn’t judging me, or American women, or Tanzanian women, for that matter – he was just making an observation based on his life experience in contrast to that of the constant influx of tourists he meets, same as any of the other men I conversed with during my trip.

When they found out that I was traveling alone and planned to climb Kilimanjaro, I suddenly commanded a strange sense of respect from the local men. “Oh, you must be tough! You must be strong!” But was I stronger than the countless mothers and sisters and daughters I saw lining the dusty roads, packages piled on their heads and across their broad shoulders, the weight of the world hung from their eyes? Did these men look at them and think they were tough, they were strong?

I don’t know. I didn’t expect to be hit with a wave of feminism in the shadow of Kilimanjaro, but I would think about these things during my coming week on the mountain – my place as a female traveler, as a female “climber,” as a female no different, yet so very different than those who surrounded me at the moment.

Well, I would think about those things until I was preoccupied with other things, I should say – like gasping for air at 18,000 feet whilst clung to a volcanic outcropping, pants around my ankles, freely blessing the frigid flanks of Kilimanjaro with arcs of champagne-colored urine under a starlit sky.

Yes, sometimes there were other things on my mind.

(To be continued…)

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